Bill Moyers Quotes - Page 5

Democracy belongs to those who exercise it.

Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?

Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

I own and operate a ferocious ego.

In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life - one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.

The thing about war is that once it's triggered, it is unyielding in its appetite. And the more it consumes and gorges, the more it wants.

The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

Unless you're willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there's no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. You just hope it strikes a spark somewhere in the critical mass of public opinion and helps some people to resist further the seductions of political and corporate advertising.

I'm angry at what's happening to America and angry with myself that I can't do more. I would be miserable if I couldn't bear witness.

I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

President Bush, whose scorn for journalists is balanced by a soft spot in his heart for the conglomerates they work for, threatens to veto the Senate action. Keep in mind that when the public was asked to submit comments to the FCC about consolidation, only one percent approved it. The President may not be listening, but the Senate is, and the public won this round. The House has a similar resolution under consideration.

The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

Barack Obama seemed to think he could win over his enemies. He certainly seemed to believe too much in his own powers of persuasion. One thing's for sure - he misunderstood the nature of his adversaries.

Although I was brought up in a culturally and religious conservative culture, as a Baptist I was taught that no one has the right to subpoena your conscience.

I like what I do and keep thinking the best is yet to come.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.

We see more and more of our Presidents and know less and less about what they do.

How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss?

The Interfaith Alliance has to become an ongoing sustaining and powerful movement whose interest is to prove that religion has a healing side as well as a killing side, and that democracy is the consequence of conscience

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths - half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.